Kathy Rain - Windows (2015)

Art

It's been talked to death, but it bears mentioning that probably nothing
will ever quite match the weirdness of Twin Peaks. And perhaps
that's for the best. But what Mark Frost and David Lynch did on that show
in the early 90s has inspired a legion of spiritual successors across an
array of media, showing off a range of quality and success. From
high-profile productions like The X-Files, LOST and Alan Wake to inscrutable experiments like Dark Seed 2, Deadly Premonition, and Hemlock Grove, you see pieces of its
influence here and there, but never anything as unapologetically weird as
the source.

You can pick apart Twin Peaks's weirdness to explain its appeal:
Lynchian surrealism, the uncanny Pacific Northwest, the piercing,
atmospheric, Angelo Badalamenti-scored mystery. Inevitably though these
aspects can be rolled up into the simple fact that it is so delightfully
strange, bizarre, quirky, synonyms ad infinitum. It is weird.

Clifftop Games' Kathy Rain isn't a direct rip-off of the Twin Peaks formula, but it is transparent about its roots in Frost
and Lynch's creation. It is a modern point-and-click adventure with an
artistic direction quite similar to the work of Ben Chandler, of Wadjet Eye
Games fame. Yet where Wadjet Eye typically deals with cyberpunk, science
fiction and urban fantasy stories, Kathy Rain is much more grounded
in the Twin Peaks weird of small town Americana.

Kathy Rain
was primarily designed by Joel Staaf Hästö, a Swedish game developer,
graduate of the Swedish game developer school Playground Squad and former
employee of Starbreeze Studios. A number of other notable people worked
alongside him, including Resonance veterans Shane Stevens and Nauris
Krauze, who served as the key artistic elements, creating the characters,
animations and backgrounds, respectively. Tove Bergqvist created the
portraits. Daniel Kobylarz served as composer. Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye
Games also signed on as Voice Director.

Set in the small rural American town of Conwell Springs, Kathy Rain is a
detective mystery infused with surrealism and occultism. The eponymous
Kathy Rain is a journalism major with, well, some rough edges to say the
least. Her only real friend is her roommate Eileen, a friendship which
works despite Kathy's aloofness and mostly due to Eileen's assertively kind
personality. Kathy returns home to Conwell Springs to investigate the death
of her grandfather Joseph Rain. While his death has been chalked up to
natural causes, something just seems off in circumstances. Kathy becomes
suspicious and explores the town, discovering that Joseph left a trail of
evidence revealing something sinister bubbling under the surface of this
humble community. Faced with mounting clues of corruption in the town,
Kathy grows ever more determined to blow the lid off this mystery.

The narrative is fueled by two occasionally intertwining strains: 1) A
Lynchian detective story about the darkness beneath a mundane town; and 2)
A character-driven story about Kathy herself, a strong woman coming to
grips with her troubled past. As the subtitle of the game, A Detective is
Born, suggests, both lead to the same conclusion: the birth of a detective.
It is the story of Kathy finding her purpose and finding herself, coming of
age, etc. Side conflicts and story arcs occur along the way concerning
women's health, broken families, friendship, loss and mental illness occur,
but all work to build up Kathy's character and her solving of the mystery.

Kathy, as a character, is a mixed bag. She exists firmly within the early
00s "tough chick" archetype. Hästö has cited Veronica
Mars, Buffy Summers, Ellen Ripley and Lisbeth Salander in particular as
influences. Pack of cigarettes always in hand, decked out in leather
jacket, facial piercings and dyed hair, riding her chopper across empty
highways. She has a "don't screw with me" exterior which she fronts maybe a
little too much, as some dialogue can get a bit cringe-worthy, similar to
Chloe from Life is Strange.

There is the impression of the writing trying too hard to get her
misanthropic side across, as she hammers sarcastic quips and snide remarks
home a little too often. Nearly every description and casual comment is
delivered with a presumed side-eye. That said, her backstory is
interesting, traumatic but rarely in an exploitative way. Only one
character twist toward the end is poorly executed, that adds little to her
character arc and honestly doesn't fit with her personality.

Kathy is well-characterized and ultimately a thoughtfully developed
character. Suffice it to say though that the sardonic, rose-with-thorns
female protagonist has been played out in both point-and-click adventure
games (April Ryan, looking at you) and the detective genre alike. That's
not to say these narratives shouldn't make use of the archetype. Rather,
writers should consider using these characters in ways that play with the
tropes rather than run with them straight.

Kathy Rain
began without much of a clear direction. It was set in the 90s for the sake
of nostalgia, in order to honor the weirdness of an era where the Queen of
England watched Twin Peaks and point-and-click adventures weren't a niche
genre. The game took form slow but steady, its shape haphazardly morphing
as plot alterations and scheduling problems arose. Despite this, Kathy Rain always firmly centers on its protagonist and the uncanny
locales of Conway Springs.

The music, composed by Daniel H. Kobylarz, is wonderful and fits perfectly
with the game's atmosphere. Somewhere between Akira Yamaoka, Angelo
Badalamenti and Stranger Things' composers Michael Stein and Kyle
Dixon, it incorporate influences from grunge to chill-hop in order to
absolutely nail the game's vibe. Most tracks are at once relaxed but eerie,
communicating the feeling of being safe in one's hometown while
simultaneously suggesting darker undercurrents.

The puzzles in Kathy Rain are solid if somewhat unremarkable.
There's a grey area between good and bad puzzles in adventure games, where
sometimes infamy can work to your advantage. The goat puzzle in Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars, for example. But only when
puzzles click fluidly within the narrative and are still challenging enough
to be memorable should they technically be considered "good". Kathy Rain's puzzles aren't intuitively challenging enough to be
memorable, but not so obtusely difficult as to be notorious either. To be
fair, despite the detective premise the narrative actually doesn't lend
itself terribly well to puzzles. The design is solid though. Not terrific,
not an outstanding example of puzzle implementation in , but it does more
right than wrong. That sums up the whole game - pretty good, just little to
make itself stand out.